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| Photo by Julie Rothe courtesy of Pixabay |
With Thanksgiving on the horizon, fresh cranberries have shown up at the supermarkets. They will be used for sauce to be served with turkey, for desserts, and for decorations. Unlike many other fruits, cranberries are native to America. The first written reference by a European to cranberries being used by Native Americans was in 1550, decades before the permanent English settlements in the New World. Historians believe that cranberries were probably part of the first Thanksgiving.
Native Americans used the berries as a dye and a food. A 1672 book describes how cranberries were used in cooking: "The Indians and English use them as mush, boyling [sic] them with sugar for sauce to eat with their meat; and it is a delicate sauce, especially with roasted mutton. Some make tarts with them as with gooseberries."
Sauces and desserts remain the primary uses of cranberries, but only about 2% of the cranberries harvested are sold fresh. The rest are commercially canned, bottled as juice, and dried.
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| Cranberry harvest, New Jersey, public domain USDA |
CRANBERRY TRIVIA--Scroll down for the answers
1. Which state in the US grows the most cranberries?
2. When were cranberries first canned? 1880, 1912, 1928
3. When did canned jellied cranberry logs first appear in stores? 1900, 1932, 1941
4. Which member of Mystery Lovers' Kitchen writes the Cranberry Cove Mysteries?
A selection of cranberry recipes from the MLK archives
Vicki Delany's Cranberry Orange Scones
Libby Dodd's Fresh Cranberry Relish
Peg Cochran's Cranberry Apple Cake
Maya Corrigan's Cranberry Tart
CRANBERRY TRIVIA ANSWERS
1. Though people often associate cranberries with Massachusetts, Wisconsin produces the most cranberries.
2. Cranberries were first canned in 1912.
3. Though the berries were first canned in 1912 for sauce and juice, the jellied cranberry log did not appear until 1941. That was also the year my parents got married and perhaps that explains my mother's love for that log. Though most of my family preferred made-from-scratch cranberry relish, we always had to offer the jellied log if my mother was at the table.
4. Peg Cochran is the author of the Cranberry Cove Mysteries.
What is your favorite cranberry dish?
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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. The 8th book in the series, Bake Offed, comes out in November 2022. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.
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What's your favorite way to eat cranberries?
